Rocket Man

The complex orbits of Wernher von Braun.

Von Braun, at the Marshall Space Flight Center, during a 1962 Presidential visit.

BOB GOMEL/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

America ’s long-ago trips to the moon are now remembered mostly amid the knickknackery of eBay, a nostalgia niche for space buffs who might otherwise engross themselves in the relics of radio serials and baseball dynasties. The handful of surviving septuagenarians who actually walked on the lunar surface have little hope of living to see humans land on Mars, even though, as decades pass, such an enterprise continues to be fitfully proclaimed and underfunded. For more than thirty years, manned space flight has been a matter not of exploration but of commuting, frequent-flier mileage interrupted by occasional disaster on the way to or from low earth orbit. Anyone who has pondered the lives of shuttle astronauts will not have been surprised by the recent rumor—denied by NASA—that they sometimes show up drunk to the launch pad.

Michael J. Neufeld, the author of “Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War” (Knopf; $35), acknowledges that “hardly anyone under age forty” knows his subject’s name, even though America’s moon shots owed a large measure of their success to him. Wernher von Braun (1912-77) had a career that was itself a kind of two-stage rocket, his scientific dreams boosted toward their late American fulfillment by his youthful service to the military apparatus of Nazi Germany. Disgusted and forbearing by turns, Neufeld, the chair of the Space History Division at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, offers this patient new biography as a corrective to the scientific and moral shakiness of the more admiring writers who have come before him. Using archival information that they neglected, he has nonetheless faced the same “inaccessibility of [von Braun’s] widow, his children, and his American relatives,” who seem to regard all biographical study of von Braun as a kind of posthumous deportation hearing, one that always carries the possibility of his being ejected from the American Cold War pantheon and repatriated to the ruins of the Third Reich.

Magnus von Braun, the rocketeer’s father, eventually compared his son to Columbus. A proud Prussian Junker, whose family had once been friendly with Kant, the elder von Braun was a dutiful civil servant who for a short period during the First World War acted as press secretary to the German chancellor. His inborn distrust of democracy was deepened by the postwar upheavals that finally sent him into banking. According to Neufeld, his middle son, Wernher, inherited from Magnus an “ability to land on his feet through multiple changes of fortune”; it was from his scientifically curious mother that the boy is thought to have acquired the gusto with which he used the telescope he received the year he turned thirteen.

Life at a boarding school just north of Weimar reinforced the anti-democratic sentiments he got from his father, but Wernher’s exposure to Hermann Oberth’s pamphlet “The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space” sparked a romantic obsession that was soon in full adolescent flower. At sixteen, home in Berlin on vacation from school, von Braun launched a wagon powered by a half-dozen toy rockets down the Tiergarten Allee. The fleeing pedestrians occasioned in him no Kantian consideration of means versus ends: “It never occurred to me,” he later recalled, “that they were not prepared to share the sidewalk with my noble experiment.”

A few years later, while studying at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Institute of Technology and participating in a space-flight society, von Braun joined some exuberant young colleagues in repeated tests of the unstable Repulsor rocket, which was based on Oberth’s design and fuelled by a combination of gasoline and liquid oxygen. The launches were financed in part by tour groups that paid to watch, but the renascent German military soon became the most intent observer of the excitement in Berlin’s Raketenflugplatz. Captain Walter Dornberger, a leading figure in the Army’s rocket-development program, took special notice of von Braun, and his “paternal advice, encouragement, and restraint” made him an ideal protector and boss for years to come. Von Braun, who once declared, “All I really want is a rich uncle,” was eager to have the Army’s money, even if that now meant substituting secrecy for publicity seeking. Neufeld offers “a qualified yes” to the question of whether von Braun could have been, at this youthful point, “as apolitical and naïve” as he later claimed. The rocket-builder turned twenty-one on March 23, 1933, the day the Reichstag gave Hitler dictatorial powers.

Von Braun saw the weaponizing of rockets as a kind of awkward adolescence for the vehicles, whose true destiny would arrive when they took men to other planets. In the meantime, he was content to let his military superiors imagine his creations carrying explosives or poison gas instead of passengers. In late 1934, successful testing of the Aggregat 2 (A-2) rocket prompted von Braun to take a Christmas vacation in London; after this quick respite, he returned to the rivalrous military culture in which both the Army and Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe were eager to hurl money at further missile development. In 1937, von Braun, only twenty-five, was put in charge of three hundred and fifty people, as his liquid-fuel-rocket group moved to a remote location on the Baltic coast near the fishing village of Peenemünde, a spot recommended by von Braun’s mother. For the next several years, he integrated an enormous operation that sought to perfect, and then mass-produce, the A-4 rocket, which the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin soon preferred to call the Vengeance Weapon, or V-2.

Neufeld catches von Braun in one ethically supine moment after another, laying out the evidence of increasing complicity, which von Braun and his later American bosses, determined to protect a major Cold War asset, eventually had to cover up. When anything mitigating or exculpatory seems to surface, it gets put on the scales. The photograph that the author develops darkens only gradually. Von Braun displays “selective memory” and “moral obtuseness,” flashes of guilt but nothing ever approaching an acceptance of responsibility for his part in the Reich’s predations.

After joining the Nazi Party, in 1937, the result of a “campaign to recruit nonmembers in positions of authority and social influence,” von Braun seems to have done little more “than send in his monthly dues.” When, three years later, he was pressured to join the S.S., he didn’t have the strength of character to risk his career by saying no, but he was reluctant to wear the uniform. He had five encounters with Hitler; at one of them, he had to force himself not to talk about space travel instead of ballistics. Initially cool to what Peenemünde was producing, the Führer, by the middle of 1943, began to see the prospect of salvation in the V-2 and ordered manufacture of the weapon on a scale wildly incongruent with its level of technical refinement. It was this strategic overreaching, more than any perception of the Reich’s brutality, that seems to have set in motion von Braun’s “alienation from the regime.”

He may not have liked using slave labor to increase V-2 production, but he did not protest. During the last years of the war, thousands of rag-clad prisoners from the Dora concentration camp unloaded parts for the gleaming rockets and then returned to underground tunnels to sleep, and be beaten, in conditions of almost unimaginable filth and contagion. The death rates were astonishing (five thousand in the first three months of 1944), and, whether or not von Braun saw any of the beatings or hangings to which his fellow S.S. officers subjected the prisoners, Neufeld makes it meticulously clear that “he saw a lot.” Ten years ago, in a passionate introduction to “Planet Dora,” Yves Béon’s memoir of life in the camp, Neufeld laid out the conditions in even more horrifying detail, while swatting away von Braun as “basically an apolitical opportunist.” Here the biographer’s effort “to be fair” to his subject seems hard won and credibly devastating. Neufeld argues that von Braun could have been charged with committing war crimes on at least two occasions, had he been judged by the same Nuremberg standard used for Albert Speer, who had looked out for Peenemünde in the German military’s competition for funds.

The luckiest break of von Braun’s life probably came in 1944, when he was arrested by the Gestapo for some loose, pessimistic talk at a party. Quickly sprung with the assistance of Dornberger and Speer, he now had a kind of anti-Nazi credential to sport in the postwar world that was fast arriving. For the rest of his life, von Braun’s activities at Dora went mostly unmentioned in magazine profiles and interviews, but his arrest by Hitler’s police tended to figure prominently, no matter that it occurred nine months before von Braun accepted a Knight’s Cross from Speer at an eerie ceremony held inside a North Rhine castle. Von Braun and three other honorees received their medals, minutes apart, between launchings of the V-2 against Antwerp, “the room suddenly lit with the flickering light of the rocket’s exhaust and slightly shaken by the reverberations of its engine,” according to Dornberger, one of the medalists.

Nearly all who have recollected and written about von Braun attest to his generous endowments of charm, optimism, and physical energy. Sleekly handsome, blond and well built, he was in his youth nicknamed Sonny Boy, after the Al Jolson song, for his ability to make gray skies seem blue. Attractive to women, a hale hunting and drinking companion, he was an inspiring boss, loyal to individual associates and family. Even Neufeld, consistently serious in his enterprise, sometimes has to resist writing of von Braun as if he were the amiable protagonist of an adventure novel. As the Allies closed in during the spring of 1945, von Braun appears more mischievous than desperate. He doesn’t just wait for the Americans; he goes looking for them, knowing they will want his expertise and betting that they can make his long-deferred dreams of space travel come true. On May 3, 1945, two days before the Russians overran Peenemünde, von Braun ends up dining on scrambled eggs and posing for pictures with the 44th U.S. Infantry Division, to whom he has just surrendered. He makes clear how much expertise he has to offer and shows remorse for nothing beyond the lost opportunity to have perfected the V-2 before the game was up.

But a new game was very much on. If the Americans thought first of von Braun’s potential usefulness to them in the protracted war that was still expected in the Pacific, they quickly redeployed him against the Soviet threat. By the fall of 1945, von Braun and dozens of ex-Peenemünders were beginning to arrive at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, from which some of them would commute by bus to White Sands, New Mexico, in order to launch, and continue perfecting, a cache of captured V-2s. Von Braun adjusted fast to his new employers, however strictly they supervised his comings and goings—especially a 1947 trip back to Germany in order to marry a much younger first cousin, during which there were fears of a possible kidnap attempt by the Soviets.

Von Braun also adapted to both the forward-looking conveniences and traditional pieties of American life. He marvelled at the comforts of Southern California and underwent an evangelical conversion inside a little white frame church in El Paso, an experience that Neufeld treats with respectful reserve, conceding that it may have originated in von Braun’s anxiety about the nuclear weapons he expected to become involved with. Still, the biographer notes that within a few years von Braun, characteristically, traded up from that white frame congregation to a more socially prominent Episcopal one.

Von Braun spent most of his long American career in Huntsville, Alabama, first as the director of the Army’s Ordnance Guided Missile Center, where he developed the Redstone rocket, a direct descendant of the V-2, and came to oversee a domain comparable to Peenemünde. In Neufeld’s narrative of the nineteen-fifties, Soviet-American rivalry seems less prominent than the interservice missile competitions of the U.S. military: the Army’s Jupiter program, the Air Force’s Thor, and the Navy’s Vanguard all wanted dibs on Armageddon. Von Braun knew that he was in the same means-and-ends predicament he’d been in since Walter Dornberger first walked into the Raketenflugplatz, two decades earlier: if he was ever to crown his missiles with men, he would first have to let them carry bombs.

But here in America, even while working for the Army, he was allowed, within limits, to pursue a parallel career as an advocate of space exploration. Von Braun started small, addressing the El Paso Rotary Club in 1947, then moving on to write a novel, which he managed to publish in Germany, about the human settlement of Mars. His wheel-shaped model for a space station—a military necessity, he argued—appeared in Popular Science, and three heavily promoted special issues of Collier’s, each devoted to space flight, began making him famous. The second of these imagined a moon landing carried out by a fifty-man crew. (Von Braun never gave much thought to robot explorers, in part because, still in his early forties, he remained hopeful of going into space himself.) True celebrity arrived in 1955, the year he became an American citizen, with his participation in the Disney broadcast “Man in Space.” He was now the face, and voice, of his millenarian cause; his German accent “fit an American cliché of scientific gravity.”

It was, of course, the Soviets’ surprise launch of Sputnik that turned space exploration, manned and unmanned, into the Cold War’s second, celestial front, a peaceful competition more attractive than the ongoing ballistic one. In the catch-up rush to launch the first U.S. satellite—Explorer I reached space in January, 1958, four months after Sputnik—the Juno rocket that von Braun developed for the Army beat out all the other American military services. President Eisenhower didn’t much like the designer, who was now pushing for too much money too quickly and too publicly, but Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and a cluster of Capitol Hill committees were won over. “Only J. Edgar Hoover has a comparably dissolving effect on congressmen,” the columnist Mary McGrory wrote. “The hardest thing the German-born scientist has to do is to say ‘down, boy’ as [they] press additional millions on him and beg him to tell them if he isn’t treated right.” Cover stories in Time and Der Spiegel mentioned the Gestapo arrest but not von Braun’s Party membership, let alone the S.S. and Dora; his lecture fees soared, and in 1960 he escorted Mamie Eisenhower to the première of “I Aim at the Stars,” a movie based, with more than usual looseness, on his life story. Mort Sahl suggested a subtitle: “But Sometimes I Hit London.”

Von Braun’s enormous Huntsville operation was folded into NASA, the new space agency, and John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to reach the moon by decade’s end turned that sphere into a glowering “deadline display device,” as von Braun put it in a letter to his aging father. His job was to prepare the huge Saturn V rocket for the journey. The man he put in charge of its production was Arthur Rudolph, a Peenemünde colleague who, twenty years before, had shown special eagerness to use the slave laborers of Dora. Lyndon Johnson, after reaching the White House, gave von Braun a cowboy hat and told him he wanted to see it on the moon. Once Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins had got there and back—the Saturn V proved amazingly reliable—von Braun was paraded through Huntsville on the shoulders of its citizens.

Throughout his book, Neufeld refuses to use the term “rocket scientist,” not because of its goofy cultural currency but because of its strict inapplicability to his subject. Despite a doctorate in physics, von Braun was, from Peenemünde to Huntsville, “an engineer and a manager of engineers,” an integrator of systems with a gift for selling them to whatever officials might continue their funding. Von Braun may have been a visionary with a penchant for the gigantic, but his engineering style tended toward the cautious, even during the deadline-driven days of the V-2 and Project Apollo. He was a late convert to the daring LOR (Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous) strategy, which speeded up the moon landings, and he was only accepting a strategy conceived by others when he implemented NASA’s policy of accelerated, “all-up” testing, which eliminated many flights of the Saturn’s individual stages and components in favor of a few that tested them all together. The V-2 may have been “a revolutionary breakthrough in rocket technology,” but by the early sixties, Neufeld writes, von Braun “had not had a really new idea in years.”

The period after Apollo 11 seems to have been the only depressing part of his life. Democracy being what it is, he could not overcome the public’s sudden indifference toward a mission to Mars, “the ultimate objective of his life’s work.” Von Braun grabbed a portion of the timid space-shuttle project for Huntsville, if only to keep the facility there flourishing and to sustain the dwindling chance that he himself might yet go into space. In the early nineteen-seventies, he served a brief Washington tour as NASA’s deputy associate administrator and discovered that he could no longer charm the congressional committees the way he used to. Carl Sagan, not an admirer, replaced him as the popular face of space, while journalists and even talk-show hosts began to ask discomfiting questions about his German past. In 1967, von Braun received the Smithsonian’s Langley Medal for aeronautical achievement; a decade later, the usually flexible David Gergen kept the Ford White House from giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The most conspicuous landmark to bear von Braun’s name—presumably to the delight of Mort Sahl—is a crater, at the western rim of the moon’s Oceanus Procellarum.

From a career standpoint, von Braun’s death, in 1977, at the age of sixty-five, may have been as lucky as it was premature, since the worst disclosures about his past—his S.S. membership and complicity in slave labor—were soon to achieve general circulation. In 1984, facing even worse revelations, Arthur Rudolph chose to renounce his American citizenship and return, after nearly forty years, to Germany. It is difficult to visit the Saturn rocket displayed today in Houston, on its side, without hearing the ghosts in the machine.

Men no longer travel far from Earth, but a few of their mechanical creations continue to sail beyond the edges of the solar system. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched on a “grand tour” of the planets less than three months after von Braun’s death, is now about ten billion miles from us, carrying with it recorded “greetings on behalf of the people” of Earth. They are spoken by the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim. ♦

Thomas Mallon, a novelist, an essayist, and a critic, is the author of, most recently, “Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years.”